June 26, 2008

Initial Shots Over Heller

Today’s Supreme Court ruling on the Second Amendment will be sparking a lot of discussion in coming days. Here are some more initial reactions:

The Volokh Conspiracy saw such an influx of traffic that its server was overwhelmed. But when the cybersmoke cleared, Orin Kerr thinks that Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion was “relatively narrow” in leaving a lot for another day. Jim Lindgren finds both Scalia’s opinion and Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent to be “quite scholarly.” And Eugene Volokh looked at the voting breakdown and says, “There’s no substitute for winning elections.”

The D.C. government is disappointed. Mayor Adrian Fenty emphasized that the D.C. gun laws remain in effect at the moment, but “I have directed the Metropolitan Police Department to implement an orderly process for allowing qualified citizens to register handguns for lawful possession in their homes.”